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The CityArts Interview: Mathieu Demy

City Arts — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 09:40:52 +0000

Americano Out of Paris

The son of the late French filmmaker Jacques Demy (Lola, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and his formerly estranged wife Agnes Varda (Far from Vietnam, The Gleaners and I), Mathieu Demy sees his first directorial feature Americano as a riposte to his mother’s 1981 film Documenteur: An Emotion Picture. One of Varda’s many semiautobiographical/fictional conceits—the title translates “docu-liar“—enlisted Demy as a nine-year-old actor playing the son of a woman trying to start her life over in Los Angeles after a tumultuous breakup. Demy, who was in a sense that boy in reality, mixes the movie mythology of his father’s romantic Nouvelle Vague masterpieces with his own turbulent relationship with his vagabond mother and enigmatic father. It’s a journey worth following.

I expected to see the influence of your parents, but I saw Wenders.

Paris, Texas, was definitely an influence. It’s one of my favorite films ever and an inspiration for Americano, definitely. Obviously, I try to put in references, winks, inside jokes, and in that state of mind as an audience, you get caught up in that game and find stuff not intended by the director. I just wanted to put iconic imagery, connections to films that I loved as a child. They are not necessarily understandable to get the story, but it’s something else on top of the story you can have fun finding.

Walter Hill, who was a friend of your father, told me that Jacques Demy believed American directors had discovered a secret—that the ideal length of a feature is 85 minutes—then they’d lost it.

I’ve never heard that. At 105 minutes, I missed the point, I’m fucked! In a way I agree and don’t really agree. When it comes to time perception, what’s so fascinating about time and so fascinating about memory, is that it’s not equal. I didn’t get bored a second watching Titanic at 3 hours 20, and I recently watched a one-hour film that seemed to be a year. When it comes to traditional storytelling, I think this is pretty smart, it’s true. But then again, the perception of time is so different from one person to another.

But as a filmmaker it seems you applied a certain discipline to the construction of scenes.

When I was editing, my perspective was that I have to make it as short as possible without hurting the feel of the film. If I could have made it 85 minutes, I would have loved to, but it would have damaged, a little bit, that sort of mellow feel I wanted. I wanted people to dream about other films to get into those reference, escape a little bit, because that’s the sort of film it is.

Were you influenced by the Nouvelle Vague or the rive gauche group, or did you feel unconstrained about adopting American influence?

Unconstrained. I knew that I wanted to make a film that fit my influences, which are not only French, or new wave because of my parents. You mentioned Wenders, Jacques would show me Westerns—Rio Bravo, Shane, Johnny Guitar—and American musicals and his musicals…

Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Gene Kelly?

Yes. And Disney cartoons, lots of Disney cartoons. And I wanted to put all those influences of the films I love, have them there, because Americano is really a film about my childhood, and related to Documenteur—being an actor in my mom’s film, and also related to the films that Jacques would show me as a kid. A Belgian journalist said I was “avant premier film,” before your first film. That was pretty smart. Because if I hadn’t the ambition to talk about where I’m coming from, the style would probably have been different.

I’d like to hear more about the cinematheque run by your parents.

They felt that as parents, the best thing to do was to show what they like, and afterwards, let me see whatever I want. Those 16mm films they would show me at the family house on the West coast of France in the summer when I had a school vacation. It would include mostly Jacques’s films, but also Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Pickpocket (Bresson), Singin’ in the Rain, the Westerns I mentioned, Max Ophuls and Hitchcock, The Birds andPsycho.

As a cinephile, I was happy to discover that you referenced the myth of Lola without feeling the need to demystify it. In the end, Lola has to remain a mystery, don’t you agree?

Absolutely. She’s a fantasy. She doesn’t exist.

But the existence of the Café Americano in your film and the singer who calls herself Lola suggests the myth has traveled.

I didn’t want to solve the Lola case. It is more like a remembrance, the echo of something. This man is searching the memory of his mother. And of course it is a metaphor for me as a filmmaker, and it is a way for me to talk about the grief of my father. And in a way this character, who is me, is looking for this character called Lola, was a way for me to embrace that mythology. But my primal intention with the Salma Hayek character was very different. It was related to the road-movie thing, to getting lost, to the mother/prostitute dichotomy, that a prostitute was going to be the one to teach him about his mother. It wasn’t [originally] my primal [instinct]. It’s funny, but in an unconscious way, I guess it was.

What did you learn about your about your parents from their films?

I definitely learned a lot from Documenteur about how we were living at that point in the relationship with my father, but even that’s a little confusing because as the title says it is a fiction and it is not that autobiographical. And Jacques’ showing me his films was a way of his telling me something. I learned that he was both a little desperate and a joyful person at the same time. And I admire very much the way he could mix comedy and drama. Which is something interesting to me as filmmaker and audience.

Let’s talk about the ’66 Mustang. It showed that the myth of Bullitt had migrated to Mexico, but I also thought it represented a certain stasis.

It could be. There were a lot of aspects in the choice of that car. At first I was trying to find a Mercury, like in Model Shop, but that was a little too much. I had to find the right level. I thought a red ’66 Mustang would be iconic and representative of more things. It could be, as you said, or a reminder of other films, and wider than relating specifically Model Shop. It’s an icon itself.

I thought it not only suggested the characters dwelling in the past, but that it was important that your character not get to return to America in the car for that reason.

Definitely. It’s a transitional thing, and a car from the past. And it’s red, and the whole Mexican part is very red, and the Los Angeles part is very green, and the Paris part very blue. The whole film gets warmer and warmer and tighter and more and more agitated as the character himself abandons this coldness and stillness about what he’s feeling and gets more and more confused and emotional. It’s like a red spaceship from the ’60s that would lead to the ending, and he definitely had to abandon it at the end.

After your character has taken his “baggage” out of the car first.

It was always symbolically important that the Americano [strip club] would burn. I tried to play with a lot of symbols. The way the neon was not realistic, and the tattoo, the Rufus Wainwright song—the sound editing at those moments strongly suggests he’s putting in a lot of fantasy in what he’s seeing. He’s fantasizing this Lola.

Did your mother really paint in L.A.?

No, actually the paintings are Jacques Demy’s. He only painted at the end of his life. He was a very methodical man, so he went back to art school when he wanted to learn more about painting and perspective and it took a long time to learn.

I missed that in the credits.

It’s not in the credits, actually.

I’m intrigued by your decision to shoot on film, why was that important to you?

It’s still possible. Soon enough it won’t be possible at all, so it was interesting for that. And I wanted to find a form that that could dialog with Documenteur, and be distinct from Documenteur but also be the same organic thing. We match modern Super 16mm from 35mm in 1981. It’s the same thing but very different. The stock is much better now and much different. We wanted to shoot in CinemaScope for this change in format. We tried 35mm but it was too clean. It didn’t match Documenteur, and I wanted a dialog.

Armond White: For Mathieu Demy, Art Is a Family Saga

Armond White — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 18:01:24 +0000

Salma Hayek and Mathieu Demy in Americano.

In tabloid parlance, Mathieu Demy is cinema royalty. Son of the late, great French new wave director Jacques Demy (Lola, Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), he is also the son of Agnès Varda, the pioneering female director of the Left Bank who excels in fiction and nonfiction films (Vagabond, The Gleaners and I).

Both parental legacies are honored by Mathieu Demy’s directorial debut, Americano, a young man’s exploration of his family heritage that has obvious autobiographical parallels but is also an extraordinary personal investigation.

Demy himself plays Martin, a Frenchman who travels from Paris to Los Angeles, where his artist mother had relocated, to bury her and claim her estate. Pursuing more than his mother’s paintings, Martin’s fascination with his psychic heritage includes the cross-cultural fascination that American culture—the American ideal—has on European consciousness.

This personalized story of political and sexual colonization is localized in the mystery of his mother’s best friend, a woman named Lola (Salma Hayek). Martin traces her to Mexico, where he discovers a Latin American version of nouvelle vague cultural magnetism; Lola strips in a bar named Café Americano, feeling exiled from the opportunities and livelihood just beyond the border.

For film students, Americano’s odyssey parallels the journey that both Jacques Demy and Varda made when the cinèphile couple trekked to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. There, Varda directed the documentary Lions Love and Demy directed The Model Shop—the former examining a countercultural demimonde, the latter an extension of the cinematic mythology that began with the film Lola, Demy’s own debut about the quest for love. For Lola’s characters, Desire epitomized Faith. It is one of cinema’s great humanist testaments, a farcical drama with a perfectly balanced narrative that plays as buoyantly as a musical.

In Lola, a romantic young man (Marc Michel) courts a small-town taxi dancer played by Anouk Aimée who is also romanced by an American sailor. She awaits her first love’s return from a mysterious U.S. sojourn driving a long white Cadillac. Americano feels more noir-like than Lola; its plot is less naïve but shows the difficulty of Euro-American relations many decades, artistic styles and social movements later. Mathieu Demy repurposes the figure of Lola as a figment of imagination, the key to understanding his parents’ desires as well as his own—particularly his personal connection to human heritage.

Hayek’s Lola is a more powerfully erotic figure than that flighty Madonna the great Aimée embodied as an émigré who wound up posing for bawdy photos in The Model Shop. Americano’s noir complexities are shadowed by the puzzle of parental sexuality. This has been a subtext in some of the docs Varda has made commemorating Jacques Demy’s 1990 death from AIDS, and it is also interesting subtext in Americano. This film’s cast includes a parade of second-generation cinema royalty: Geraldine Chaplin, Chiara Mastroianni and Carlos Bardem.

Exploring love and desire as a family saga takes work of staggering sophistication and bravery, which Mathieu Demy accomplishes with honesty, imagination and redemptive brilliance. The troubled and perplexed Martin realizes a more complicated innocence—not naïveté—than a mere fanboy movie tribute. “I’ll walk you home,” he tells a Mexican urchin.

Americano is, at last, a cinematic version of the famous Delmore Schwartz parent-cinema-child short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” It is Demy’s dedication to family heritage that turns his connection to a series of inherited clues and obligations into a film of genuine originality.

To read the full review at City Arts click here.

Cinematic Royalty: Film Becomes Autobiography in Mathieu Demy’s Debut Americano

Doug Strassler — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:24:46 +0000

Americano is a movie haunted by parents. In his feature debut, Mathieu Demy – son of directors Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda – directed, wrote, and stars in this film as Martin, a stunted Frenchman who must travel back to Los Angeles following the death of his estranged mother. Stuck at a crossroads in his relationship with girlfriend Claire (Chiara Mastroianni, scion of father Marcello and mother Catherine Deneuve), he picks up and heads to America to try and posthumously un-knot the ties that bind.

Identity is a big question for Martin upon arrival, as he shifts from the European arrivals line to the U.S. Citizen return line at LAX. Still plagued by astonishment as how his mother could have essentially abandoned him (after living as a youngster in California, he and his father moved to France; Martin’s mother stayed forever), Martin has lingering questions about who he is. And after being picked up by his mother’s caretaker and friend, Linda (Geraldine Chaplin, famous daughter of – naturally – Charlie), Martin begins to unravel a hidden chapter of his mother’s life.

These clues lead him to Tijuana to hunt a down an enigmatic stripper named Lola, played by Salma Hayek in a rare raw performance for the typically calculating star. Hayek may have no famous parents, but once Lola enters the picture, Americano begins to follow in the footsteps of many famous film forebears – and not just the expected heart of darkness film noir ancestors Americano so closely mimics in its formula-hewing second half (there are few surprises in store for Lola, Martin, or Luis, the thuggish club manager played by Carlos Bardem).

Demy actually sticks even closer to home, evoking his father’s Lola and Model Shop (Anouk Aimée played the character who would ultimately become Hayek’s namesake here) as Martin enters further into Lola’s world of smoke and mirrors. If his ideas as a writer feel a bit rote (the title could be I Never Sang for My Mother on Golden Pond, if one could find someone to translate that into French), Demy’s performance never feels less than authentic. Martin is an untethered man who feels nothing – a quite convincing portrait of functional depression – and this trip, one that haunts and even emasculates him, is the jolt he needs to wake him up to life.

Americano also cannot help but feel autobiographical. Visually, literally, we are watching Demy’s own life. Martin recalls cloudy memories of his early years in Venice, which Demy presents through the use of his appearance as a child in his own mother’s 1981 Documenteur. This possibly pretentious fusion of life and fiction, usually left in the hand of more seasoned filmmakers, may polarize purists but satisfy cineastes. Demy’s movie is not a masterpiece, but it doesn’t aim to be. What the auteur has created is a window into his soul. Americano portrays the artist as a young man as well as an adult. And he leaves it up to the viewer, in charting that path, to the connect the dots of his or her own journey.

The CityArts Interview with Director Mathieu Demy

City Arts — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:39:24 +0000

By Gregory Solman